Portfolio discovery and analysis for migration - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Targeted business outcomes

Portfolio discovery and analysis for migration

Zach Hansen, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

February 2022 (document history)

The portfolio discovery and analysis workstream defines the approach for defining, collecting, and analyzing the data required to create a migration plan. This workstream helps you estimate the level of effort and costs associated with migrating your portfolio of applications, as well as the estimated annual run rates for compute and storage resources on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This workstream also defines the complete dataset required to properly analyze, group and prioritize application migrations, suggests suitable data collection tools if your data is incomplete or inaccurate, determines the criteria to select pilot migration workloads, and provides a general prioritization of migrations. This guide walks you through the high-level steps to accomplish these objectives.

Targeted business outcomes

This guide discusses the AWS prescriptive model for portfolio discovery and analysis. Although other methods are available, they may compromise the completeness or depth of the results.

There are three outcomes expected from portfolio discovery and analysis:

  • A detailed knowledge of the migrating environment

  • An understanding of the interdependencies of the portfolio

  • A migration wave plan that will contain details about which workloads will be migrating and when

To make decisions about the workloads you are migrating, you must fully understand the migrating environment. You must be familiar with each individual workload, as well as how each workload depends on other workloads to support your business.

Developing a well thought out plan that requires minimal revisions helps support your business objectives by mitigating risks like unplanned downtime and reducing the cost of migrating. Although you will find out more about the workloads during portfolio discovery, and need to update the plan accordingly, this guide will help you minimize the frequency and extent of those revisions.